Morton on Mexico

ISSN 0143-6597 print/ISSN 1360-2241 online/03/040631-23 � 2003 Third World QuarterlyDOI: 10.1080/0143659032000105795 631

Third World Quarterly, Vol 24, No 4, pp 631–653, 2003

In June 1998 a conference entitled ‘Forthcoming Latin America: A Hard Look atthe Future of the Region’ was convened by Latin American Newsletters inLondon. Funded by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in collaborationwith the Institute for European–Latin American Relations (IRELA), the UnitedNations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), the Economic Com-mission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the WestMerchantBank, the intention was to bring participants into contact with ‘the experts’ tofocus on the region of Latin America.1 The conference was opened by EnriqueIglesias (President, IDB), who commented on the ‘silent revolution’ that hadswept across Latin America in the context of globalisation. Additionally, RicardoHausmann (Chief Economist, IDB) lamented the prevalence of ‘weak consumers’across Latin America, Marcos de Azambuja (Ambassador of Brazil, Paris)resolutely affirmed that ‘the consumer is to the economy what the voter is topolitics’ and that ‘there is no alternative intellectual discussion’ to the reality ofglobalisation, while Rogelio Pfirter (Ambassador of Argentina, London) assertedthat ‘the policies of the 1970s took a long time to go away’.

At the same time as such ideologically anaesthetising analysis was underdiscussion, the Mexican intellectual Carlos Fuentes was publicly commenting onsimilar issues, in particular, some of the essential problems of the North

Structural change and neoliberalismin Mexico: ‘passive revolution’ in theglobal political economy

ADAM DAVID MORTON

ABSTRACT This article examines an enduring context of ‘passive revolution’ inthe making of modern Mexico by developing an account of the rise of neo-liberalism during a period of structural change since the 1970s. It does so byanalysing and understanding both the unfolding accumulation strategy and thehegemonic project of neoliberalism in Mexico since the 1970s as emblematic ofthe survival and reorganisation of capitalism through a period of state crisis.This is recognised as a strategy of ‘passive revolution’, the effects of which stillleave an imprint on present development initiatives in Mexico. Therefore, throughthe notion of ‘passive revolution’, the article not only focuses on the recent pastcircumstances, but also on the present unfolding consequences, of neoliberalcapitalist development in Mexico. This approach also leaves open the question of‘anti-passive revolution’ strategies of resistance to neoliberalism.

Adam David Morton is in the Department of Politics and International Relations, Lancaster University,Cartmel College, Lancaster LA1 4YL, UK. Email: [email protected].

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American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the impact of ‘savage capitalism’on the people of Mexico. According to Fuentes, ‘the problem of globalisation isthat it is only interested in merchandise … and the unlimited movement ofcapital … with no productive purpose whatsoever’.2 Hence the need, according toFuentes, to curb the untrammelled movement of capital which has totallyspeculative and non-productive purposes in order to correct the ‘bad face ofneoliberalism’.3 Yet what processes have led to the development of these perspec-tives on the political economy of Latin America? Indeed, how have some of theleading elites from the region of Latin America come to champion a neoliberalconsensus deemed irreversible? What is meant by the declaration that the‘policies of the 1970s took a long time to go away’ and how does this relate toan understanding of globalisation? Most crucially, how are these processesspecifically related to Mexico? This article develops a critical analysis of theseunfolding processes commonly understood under the rubric of globalisation. Itwill do so by tracing the rise of certain social forces, shaped by a restructuring ofrelations of production within the form of state in Mexico, to suggest that a shiftoccurred in the 1970s, which began the move towards a neoliberal strategy ofcapitalist accumulation. This shift not only heralded an end to the phase ofImport Substitution Industrialisation (ISI) growth, or ‘desarollo estabilizador’, butalso fundamentally altered and unravelled the social basis of the hegemony ofthe once-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). It was this dwindlinghegemony that was finally ended by the victory of Vicente Fox Quesada in the2 July 2000 elections in Mexico. Yet this electoral change raises questions aboutwhether a second generation of neoliberal capitalist development is underway inMexico, heralding an underlying continuity in policy, regardless of recent debateon the ‘post-Washington consensus’.4

To tackle these issues the article will elaborate upon an enduring context ofpassive revolution in the history of Mexico. This refers to conditions of socio-economic modernisation so that changes in production relations are accom-modated within existing social and institutional forms but without fundamentallychallenging the established political order. It is a theory of the survival andreorganisation of capitalism through periods of crisis, when crucial aspects ofcapitalist social relations are not overcome but reproduced in new forms, leadingto the furtherance of state power and an institutional framework consonant withcapitalist property relations.5 The main benefit of this recourse to the notion ofpassive revolution is that it leads one to analyse prevalent consensual aspectswithin conditions of hegemony. To put it in Hugues Portelli’s apt words: ‘There isno social system where consensus serves as the sole basis of hegemony nor astate where the same [mismo] social group can durably maintain its dominationon the basis of pure coercion.’6 In contrast to earlier debates on bureaucraticauthoritarianism and state corporatism in Mexico and Latin America, as well asmore recent analyses on hegemony that develop similar conclusions, thefollowing argument does not conflate hegemony with dominance or coercion, nordoes it presume that conditions of hegemony are here one day and gone the next.7

Instead, the following argument draws attention to the variations in, and thegradual erosion of, conditions of hegemony as well as to the mix of consensualand coercive elements that have constituted these conditions within the making of

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modern Mexico.To promote this analysis the argument is structured into three main sections. A

first section will briefly outline the centrality of a theory of passive revolutionand hegemony in understanding the making of modern Mexico. Second, theanalysis will concentrate on a context of passive revolution in the history ofMexico by developing an account of structural change to the political economysince the 1970s. This will proceed by 1) examining the accumulation strategy ofneoliberalism and 2) analysing how this affected the hegemonic project of thePRI. While neoliberalism was to gain ascendancy as the chief accumulationstrategy in Mexico through the 1980s and 1990s, this section draws initialattention to the context of the 1970s in order to account for contingent processesof struggle between social forces that provided the background for subsequentdevelopments. Key developments in this period, linked to the restructuring ofproduction relations, promoted cleavages between social forces in Mexico thatwould lead to a shift from the accumulation strategy of ISI to the eventual agendaof neoliberalism. It will be clear that the promotion of neoliberalism and theconsequent struggle between social forces proceeded in a particular way inMexico more attuned to specific sociopolitical conditions. Neoliberalism did notinvolve the rollback of the state in Mexico but was rooted in the restructuring ofstate–civil society relations that included a constant renegotiation of state–business–labour relations and the promotion of interventionist projects designedto harness social mobilisation. This is important because it becomes possible toshow how social forces within the state in Mexico authored the globalisation ofneoliberal restructuring.8 Put differently, the agency of particular social forces inconstituting and reproducing the globalisation of neoliberalism is realised.

Finally, a third section will illustrate how conditions of passive revolution stillprevail after the presidential election of Vicente Fox on 2 July 2000. In particular,it will show how there has been an attempt to shift politics putatively beyondneoliberalism, to modernise capitalist social relations and reconstitute socialcohesion along the lines of the Alternativa Latinoamericana (Latin AmericanAlternative), a variant of the ‘post-Washington consensus’ promoted by RobertoMangabeira Unger and spearheaded in Mexico by Jorge Castañeda. While adetailed analysis of resistance movements is beyond the purview of this discus-sion, linkages will also be made to alternative social forces that have pursueddialectically opposed political strategies in the hope of creating new social andpolitical relations. It will thus be clear how the overall discussion is linkedthrough the notion of passive revolution by considering both the restructuring ofcapitalism, or the ‘counter-attack of capital’, organised by ruling social forcesthrough neoliberal restructuring, and the articulation of ‘anti-passive revolution’strategies of resistance by progressive forces in Mexico.9

The history of Mexico seen as a struggle of ‘passive revolution’?

In recent debates in International Political Economy (IPE) the concept of passiverevolution has gained currency within a series of similar but diverse ‘neo-Gramscian perspectives’,10 to address historical processes of state formationin the industrialising world. While a focus is generally drawn to processes of

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capitalist expansion in ‘developmentalist states’, within which the state mediatesbetween classes, acting as an arbiter of social conflict, little attention is granted tospecific conditions within states confronted by an impasse in social develop-ment.11 Rarely is there an effort to focus on the arrangements within particularforms of state that lead to the incorporation of fundamental economic, social,political and ideological changes in conformity with changes in capitalism on aworld scale.12 In short, there has been little effort to address the imperatives ofclass struggle brought about by the expansion of capital and the internalisation ofclass interests within historically determined forms of state.13 At the same time,scepticism has also been raised about the lack of direct engagement with thethought and practice of the main exponent of the notion of passive revolution,namely the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.14 Hence a turn, first, to the specificwritings of Antonio Gramsci to outline in more detail the notion of passiverevolution before, subsequently, considering how these conditions inhere withinthe specific circumstances of class struggle within the state in Mexico.

The Risorgimento, the movement for Italian national liberation that culminatedin the political unification of the country in 1860–61, and a series of otherhistorical phenomena throughout nineteenth century Europe were described byGramsci as ‘passive revolutions’. The concept, rooted in his writings analysingthe crisis of the liberal state in Italy, was linked to the rise of bourgeois revolu-tions, with the history of Europe in the nineteenth century seen as a struggle ofpassive revolution.15 According to Gramsci, the French Revolution (1789)established a bourgeois state on the basis of popular support and the eliminationof old feudal classes yet, across Europe, the institution of political forms suitableto the expansion of capitalism occurred differently in a more reformist manner.16

Following the post-Napoleonic restoration (1815–48), the tendency to establishbourgeois social and political order was regarded as something of a universalprinciple but not in an absolute or fixed sense.17 ‘All history from 1815 onwards’,wrote Gramsci, ‘shows the efforts of the traditional classes to prevent theformation of a collective will … and to maintain “economic–corporate” powerin an international system of passive equilibrium’.18 As Eric Hobsbawm haselaborated, this was indicative of mid-nineteenth century European nationalunifications during which people become ancillaries of change organised fromabove based on elite-led projects. In underdeveloped parts of the world thisprocess was mimetic, as ‘countries seeking to break through modernity arenormally derivative and unoriginal in their ideas, though necessarily not so intheir practices’.19 A bourgeois revolution, therefore, was a revolution, marked byviolent social upheaval, but it involved a relatively small elite giving a decidedlycapitalist imprint to the changes, leading to the creation of state power and aninstitutional framework consonant with capitalist property relations.20

The ‘passive’ aspect refers to the way challenges may be thwarted so thatchanges in production relations are accommodated within the current socialformation. This might not be done in a ‘passive’ way but refers to the attempt at‘revolution’ through state intervention or the inclusion of new social groupswithin the hegemony of a political order but without an expansion of masscontrol over politics.21 A passive revolution may therefore unfold thanks topopular demands and entail a ‘progressive’ element or fundamental change in the

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organisation of a political order. Yet it was more likely to result in a dialecticalcombination of progressive and reactionary elements described as ‘revolution-restoration’ or ‘revolution without revolution’.22 While the ruling classes mightgarner real political support among the wider population, a passive revolutiontends to indicate a highly restricted form of hegemony.23 Within conditions ofpassive revolution ‘the important thing is to analyse more profoundly … the factthat a state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal’.24

This unfolds when the ruling class is unable to fully integrate the people throughconditions of hegemony, or when ‘they were aiming at the creation of a modernstate … [but] in fact produced a bastard’.25 It is one of those cases when asituation of ‘“domination” without that of “leadership”: dictatorship withouthegemony’ prevails because it is possible for the state to dominate civil society,which is ‘shapeless and chaotic’ as it is in ‘a sporadic, localised form, withoutany national nexus’.26 However, there is also an intrinsic weakness within thestate, which is ‘lacking effective autonomy’ linked to both ‘internal as well asinternational relations’, because of the narrow and debilitating interests of ‘asceptical and cowardly ruling stratum’.27 Hence, through the expansion of stateintervention, a partial or relatively fragile form of hegemony may only prevail,limited to a narrow social group rather than the whole of society. This may havevarious ‘path-dependent’ (but not deterministic) effects that shape and define thenature and purpose of state actions during particular phases of development andthe distinctive institutional configurations of capitalism.28

The conditions of passive revolution therefore differ from ‘the real exercise ofhegemony over the whole of society which alone permits a certain organic equi-librium’.29 This expression of hegemony is based on the development ofa ‘“diffused” and capillary form of indirect pressure’ relying on the organicdevelopment of a relationship between leaders and led, rulers and ruled,where real predominance is concealed behind a veil of consent.30 In such cases,opposition elements are assimilated through ‘capillary articulations’ transmittedvia channels of public opinion, albeit still with difficulty, friction and loss ofenergy.31

The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony … is characterised by a combination of forceand consent which balance each other so that force does not overwhelm consent butrather appears to be backed by the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion.32

A situation of passive revolution, by contrast, expresses a condition in whichsocial forces are in conflict, without any prevailing in the struggle to constitute(or reconstitute) an organic equilibrium based on relations of hegemony. Theequilibrium of a passive revolution is therefore unstable and contains withinitself the danger of disintegrating into a catastrophic equilibrium.33 Within thesestructural conditions, ‘events that go under the specific name of “crisis” have thenburst onto the scene’.34

Finally, the concept of passive revolution has also been used to describe similarbut discrete situations characterised by the expansion of capital and theemergence of the modern state. ‘The concept of passive revolution, it seems tome’, declared Gramsci, ‘applies not only to Italy but also to those countries that

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modernise the state through a series of reforms … without undergoing a politicalrevolution of a radical Jacobin-type.’35 The task was to develop a critical analysisof different passive revolutions and draw out general principles of politicalscience but without succumbing to mechanical application or a form of deter-ministic fatalism. This involves advancing an understanding of processes ofcapitalist development in particular cases, by unravelling struggles overhegemony in state–civil society relations among social forces shaped by changesin the social relations of production, as part of general trends. The followingsection therefore poses particular questions about conditions of passiverevolution in relation to a period of structural change in the history of Mexico,within which the rise of a strategy of neoliberal capitalist accumulation can besituated.

Structural change in the form of state in Mexico

One way of examining the constitution of neoliberalism in Mexico and the socialbases of the state, meaning the specific configuration of class forces that supportsthe basic structure of state–civil society relations, is to distinguish analyticallybetween an accumulation strategy and a hegemonic project. An accumulationstrategy defines a specific economic ‘growth model’ including the various extra-economic preconditions and general strategies appropriate for its realisation. Thesuccess of a particular accumulation strategy relies upon the complex relationsamong different fractions of capital as well as the balance of forces betweendominant and subordinate classes, hence the importance of a hegemonic project.This involves the mobilisation of support behind a concrete programme thatbrings about a union of different interests.36 An accumulation strategy is primarilyorientated towards the relations of production and thus to the balance of classforces, while hegemonic projects are typically orientated towards broader issuesgrounded not only in the economy but in the whole sphere of state–civil societyrelations. My argument is that the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico can be under-stood within these terms. The conflicts of interest which eventually culminated inthe accumulation strategy of neoliberalism, especially reflected in the Presidencyof Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94), were pursued while reconfiguringthe hegemonic project of the PRI. This resulted in fragmentation, leading to acontemporary crisis of authority in Mexico. It now remains to give an account ofthe context within which the conflicts of interest between class forces took placethat led to changes in the form of state in Mexico before considering morecontemporary circumstances.

The rise of a neoliberal accumulation strategy in Mexico

In order to account for the period that Mexicans refer to as the ‘tragic dozen’(1970–82), the determinant factor for the transition from an ISI strategy ofaccumulation to that commonly referred to as the neoliberal strategy of salinismohas been seen as a set of institutional changes within the organisation of thestate.37 The crucial phase that laid the basis for this shift in accumulation strategyin Mexico was the period in the 1970s that set the stage for subsequent develop-

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ments.38 As one informed commentator has put it: ‘You cannot explain whathappened in Mexico without seeing events intrinsically connected to the globalpolitical economy in the 1970s’.39

By the 1970s, during the sexenio (six-year term) of Luis Echeverría (1970–76),the government needed to revive its deteriorating legitimacy and respondedwith a neo-populist programme of political and social reforms. The Echeverríaadministration embarked on a macroeconomic strategy of ‘shared development’within a supposed apertura democráta (democratic opening) to forge a populistcoalition between national industrialists, peasants, urban marginals, disillusionedlabour sectors, students and the middle classes. Yet, faced by pressure from inter-nationally linked industrialists, Echeverría was unable to implement sufficient taxincreases in order to support public spending directed towards national industryand the working- and middle-class sectors. Unable to implement tax increases oninternationally linked capital, foreign borrowing therefore became the majorsource of finance for development policies.40 Also, because of expanded stateintervention in the economy and its increasingly anti-private sector rhetoric, thegovernment began to lose the support of significant sectors of capital. Such stateintervention increasingly alienated the private sector and, as a result, ‘the alliancethat ha[d] existed between state and national capital was severely strained’.41

An indication of this was the rise of the private sector in vocally articulating itsopposition, notably with the founding of the Business Co-ordinating Council(CCE) in 1975, which proposed economic policies for the first time in oppositionto the government following the impact of the oil crisis of 1973 on Mexico’seconomic performance. It is important to note that, while neoliberalism had nottaken hold at this time, crucial cleavages within the organisation of the state weredeveloping that would lead to shifts in capitalist accumulation.

Pivotal in preparing the conditions for such changes was the Mexican financialcrisis of 1976. As James Cockcroft has put it, ‘capital flight, noncompetitivenessof Mexican products, dollarisation of the economy, and IMF pressures forced anearly 100 percent devaluation of the peso in late 1976, almost doubling thereal foreign debt … as well as the real costs of imported capital goods—to thedetriment of nonmonopoly firms and the advantage of the TNCs’.42 Yet thefinancial crisis can be seen to be as much related to the expansionary public-sector expenditure policies driven by the crisis of the PRI as to the macro-economic disequilibria driven by structural change in the globalising politicaleconomy linked to US inflation. While the IMF certainly imposed austeritymeasures and surveillance mechanisms on Mexico, it has been argued that thesewere less violatory than feared; however, they did have a strong impact byaltering the internal distribution of power and resources between social classes inMexico.43

At almost the same time large oil reserves were also discovered which, by1982, were estimated at 72 billion barrels, with probable reserves at 90–150billion and potential reserves at 250 billion, amounting to the sixth largestreserves in the world.44 Hence the political economy of Mexico becamedependent on petroleum-fuelled development under the administration of JoséLópez Portillo (1976–82) while attempts were made to balance the tensionsbetween competing social classes. However, a coherent course, capable of

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satisfying the interests of national and internationally linked capital in Mexico,was not set. By the time world oil prices dropped in 1981, leading to reduced oilrevenues, accelerating debt obligations and a surge in capital flight, Mexico facedanother financial crisis that initially led to the nationalisation of the banks on1 September 1982. This was a ‘last-ditch effort’ to recoup revenues for the publicsector and reassert some form of state autonomy but it resulted in reinforcingprivate-sector opposition, capital flight, inflation and balance of paymentsproblems.45

Similar to the earlier crisis, the result of the 1982 debt crisis was a combinationof mutually reinforcing factors both within the globalising political economy andthe form of state in Mexico.

The crisis was precipitated by the world oil glut, a world economic recession,and rising interest rates in the United States, but its root causes were domestic:excessively expansionary monetary and social policies, persistent overvaulation ofthe peso, over-dependence of the public sector on a single source of revenue (oilexports), a stagnant agriculture sector (at least that part which produced basicfoodstuffs for domestic consumption), an inefficient and globally uncompetitiveindustrial plant, excessive labour force growth … a capital-intensive developmentmodel that made it impossible to create an adequate employment base, endemiccorruption in government, and resistance by entrenched economic and politicalinterests to structural reforms.46

This resulted in another IMF austerity programme—involving reductions ingovernment subsidies for foodstuffs and basic consumer items, increases in taxeson consumption, and tight wage controls targeted to control inflation—which theMexican administration implemented by exceeding planned targets. Therefore,the crisis arose as a result of a conjunction of factors that also included the rise oftechnocrats—underway throughout the 1970s—which led to the ascendancyof the accumulation strategy of neoliberalism.47 Crucial at this time were theinstitutional career paths of the elite, which began to alter so that ministriesassociated with banking and finance planning provided the career experiencelikely to lead to the upper echelons of government. Notably this was the contextwithin which the Ministry of Programming and Budget (SPP) came to rise toinstitutional predominance as a pivotal camarilla (clique) within the organisationof the state.

The SPP was formed in 1976 and created the process of taking economic policymaking away from the Ministry of the Treasury and Public Credit (SHCP).Overall, not only was direct control over the most important resources ofinformation for plans and projects in the bureaucracy secured, but competingfactions within the PRI could also be circumvented. Significantly, the threepresidents preceeding Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000) all originated from agenciesrelated to these changes, with López Portillo (1976–82) hailing from SHCP andMiguel de la Madrid (1982–88) and Carlos Salinas (1988–94) from SPP. By 1983almost 60% of all cabinet-level appointees had started their careers in thesesectors and over 80% had some experience within them, while in the Salinascabinet 33% had experience in SHCP and 50% had worked in SPP.48 The rise ofsuch technocrats ensured that precedence was accorded to ministries of finance

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like SPP that would subordinate other ministries and prioritise policies moreattuned to transnational economic processes. The growing influence of neoliberalideas can therefore be linked to the existence of a transnational capitalist classconnecting IMF analysts, private investors and bank officials, as well as govern-ment technocrats in and beyond the PRI in Mexico. To cite Gramsci, this was aprocess whereby, ‘in the political party the elements of an economic social groupget beyond that moment of their historical development and become agents ofmore general activities of a national and international character.’49

A pivotal factor in the formation of this transnational capitalist class in Mexicowas the move during the Echeverría presidency after the oil boom of 1975–76 toexpand scholarships to foreign universities as a method of integrating dissidentsradicalised by the massacre of students at Tlatelolco on 2 October 1968.50 Thus,throughout the 1970s, not only was there a dramatic increase in the educationalbudget within Mexico, leading to a 290% increase in university students between1970 and 1976, but the number of scholarships for study abroad increased evenmore dramatically.51 It has therefore been argued that the dissemination of foreignideas in Mexico increased as a direct result of the oil boom.52 This led to manytecnócratas adopting a more conservative ideology while becoming dependent onthe president for their subsequent governmental position, resulting in thecrucial rise of camarillas that shifted institutional loyalty from a particularministry or subgroup within the bureaucracy to close political and personallinks with the president. It was this technocratic elite that took for granted theexhaustion of the previous ISI development strategy and engendered a degree ofsocial conformism favouring the adoption of an accumulation strategy of neo-liberalism. Yet it was hardly questioned to what extent such structural problemswere not just intrinsic to ISI but related also to a series of exogenous shocks, suchas the oil crisis, combined with erroneous decisions made in the 1970s followingthe oil boom.53 Overall though, the overriding significance of the above changeswas that the rise of tecnócratas (or the ‘cult of technocracy’) in Mexico wasadvanced by links with transnational capital during a period of structural changein the 1970s.54

For example, during this period of structural change or the ‘reformationof capitalism’ in Mexico, fractions of a transnational capitalist class becameinfluential in shaping the maquila (in-bond) strategy of export-led industrial-isation fuelled by foreign investment, technology and transnational capital.55

While the maquila industry has its roots in the Border IndustrialisationProgramme (BIP), introduced in 1965 after the USA ended the braceroprogramme (which provided a legal basis for labour migration from Mexico tothe USA), it was not until the 1970s that economic promotion committees beganto bring to fruition the earlier visions of border industrialisation, particularlyunder the auspices of the Secretariat of Commerce and Industrial Development(SECOFI), the industry ministry, within de la Madrid’s administration. Between1979 and 1985 maquilas increased by 40% and their employees almost doubled.56

At an early stage in this transformation the interests of private capital wererepresented by organisations within the National Chamber of ManufacturingIndustries (CANACINTRA). Along with other capitalist groups—such as theConfederation of Chambers of Industry (CONCAMIN), the Confederation of

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National Chambers of Commerce, Services and Tourism (CONCANACO) and theEmployers’ Confederation of the Republic of Mexico (COPARMEX)—the majorfractions of large and medium-sized manufacturers co-ordinated and consolidatedcapital’s influence over the state. This influence proceeded further when suchcapitalist organisations regrouped through the CCE in 1975, to represent theinterests of large-scale monopoly capital within the state. The maquila industrywas thus promoted, nurtured and supervised by fractions of a transnationalcapitalist class in Mexico through processes of carefully managed state–labour–business relations that developed into a full-blown export-led strategy ofindustrialisation.57 However, the interests of transnational capital also reachedbeyond the maquila industry to gradually secure the integration of Mexico intothe global political economy. Hence, ‘the official agricultural policies of the DíazOrdaz and Echeverría periods [also] promoted transformations which deepenedthe integration of local farmers into a transnational system of agriculturalproduction’.58 One consequence of this effort to reproduce the accumulationstrategy of neoliberalism in Mexico was the 1992 reform of collective ejido land-holdings enshrined in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution, undertaken as aprelude to entry into NAFTA in 1994.59

A feature that also became crucial in the struggle over the neoliberal accumula-tion strategy was the introduction of the Economic Solidarity Pact (PSE) in 1987.The PSE was initially a mixed or ‘heterodox’ programme that aimed to tame thecurrent account deficit and inflation based on a commitment to fiscal discipline, afixed exchange rate and concerted wage and price controls. It has been heraldedas instrumental in achieving a successful renegotiation of external debt followingthe debt crisis of 1982, in line with the Baker (1985) and Brady (1989) Plans, andfurther radicalising the import liberalisation programme following Mexico’s entryinto the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).60

Overall, three components of the PSE were crucial: the government’s pledge infavour of the acceleration of privatisation and de-regulation; the centralityawarded to the CCE; and the use of large retailers’ market power to disciplineprivate firms and further ensure the participation of business elites.61 The CCE—itself formed from a forerunner of big business private sector groups within thecapitalist class known as the Mexican Businessmen’s Council (CMHN)—becamepivotal in initiating and implementing the PSE.62 As indicated earlier, the classinterests of the CCE became centred around a ‘transnationalised’ segment ofnational capital including direct shareholders of large conglomerates tied to theexport sector with experience in elite business organisations.63 Subsequently,many of the CCE leaders became more closely linked with the PRI via committeesand employers’ associations to increase interest representation within the state.Little wonder, therefore, that the class interests represented by the CCE had a hugeimpact on the policies implemented by the PRI, including increased privatisation.64

One commentator has gone so far as to argue that the relationship between theprivate sector and the political class became part of a narrow clique exercising a‘private hegemony’ so that, ‘it would be no exaggeration to say that this alliancewas based on a carefully thought-out strategy to bring public policy in line withprivate sector demands, to effect a global reform of the relationship between thestate and society, and hence to redesign Mexico’s insertion into the emerging

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neoliberal global order’.65

As a consequence, there was a shift in the PSE from a commitment to state–labour corporatist relations to a disarticulation, but not severing, of the state–labour alliance in favour of the overriding interests of capital. This has beenvariously recognised as a form of ‘new unionism’ or neo-corporatism, ‘anarrangement involving the reduction of centralised labour power and theparticipation of labour in increasing productivity’.66 The privatisation of theMexican Telephone Company (TELMEX) in 1990, one of the pinnacles of theprivatisation programme, particularly reflected the strategy of ‘new unionism’.This not only involved manipulation of the Mexican Telephone Workers’ Union(STRM), one of the key labour organisations used to secure privatisation. It alsoentailed Salinas permitting the leader of STRM, Hernández Juárez, to create analternative labour federation, the Federation of Goods and Services Unions(FESEBES), to further facilitate privatisation. Hence labour became moredependent on the PRI during the privatisation of TELMEX, which generated newresources for corruption and clientelism and lessened union democracy withinSTRM.67 What is important here, then, is that the accumulation strategy associatedwith neoliberalism did not involve a wholesale retreat of the state. As Centenohas commented, ‘the pacto [PSE] demonstrated that the técnocratas were notgeneric neoliberals who applied monetarist policies indiscriminately but werewilling to utilise a variety of mechanisms to establish control over theeconomy’.68 The analysis now turns from discussing the details of how theneoliberal strategy of accumulation privileged particular social relations ofproduction in Mexico to address how the hegemonic project of the PRI wasaltered and undermined.

The changing circumstances of PRI hegemony

Intrinsically linked to changes in the social relations of production stemmingfrom the 1970s was an increase in the sources of political instability in Mexico.‘Political struggles over national economic policy began in the early 1970s whenproblems associated with import-substituting industrialisation began to mount.’69

These struggles were manifest in the sexenios of Echeverría (1970–76) andLópez Portillo (1976–82) to the extent that the PRI faced problems involving anerosion of political legitimacy following the Tlatelolco massacre in 1968, adiscontented urban middle class, disaffection with the ISI accumulation strategy,the emergence of new opposition movements outside the officially recognisedparty system, the additional emergence of urban and rural guerrilla movementsand the declining ability of the PRI to compete with registered opposition parties.70

For instance, the National Co-ordinating Committee of Educational Workers(CNTE), founded in 1979, came to challenge, particularly in the peasant com-munities of Chiapas, the state-imposed and privileged position of the NationalEducation Workers’ Union (SNTE), established in 1943.71 This was also the periodwhen independent unions articulated a so-called insurgencia obrera (labourinsurgency) to question the lack of autonomy and democracy of official unionsand to articulate demands across a variety of sectors beyond purely economicconcerns.72 Yet, as a harbinger of reforms under the neoliberal accumulation

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strategy, the López Portillo administration coercively suppressed many of theseopposition movements and implemented economic reforms in favour of theprivate sector as a prelude to introducing the Law on Political Organisations andElectoral Processes (LOPPE) in 1977. Between 1976 and 1979 the dynamism ofthe insurgencia obrera faded and became dominated by the themes of economiccrisis and austerity.73 At the same time the LOPPE became an attempt to managepolitical liberalisation within the current of the apertura democráta by enlargingthe arena for party competition and integrating leftist political organisationswhile inducing them to renounce extra-legal forms of action. The measures, forexample, involved the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) obtaining the officialregistration as a political party that led to its first legal participation (since 1949)in elections (those of 1979). Subsequently, in 1981, the PCM merged with fourother left-wing parties to establish the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM).74

Thus the PCM, the oldest communist party in Latin America at that time,effectively dissolved itself while attempting to compete electorally within theparameters of the LOPPE reform.75 The reform, therefore, was more than a simpleco-optation measure. It was designed to frame and condition the very institutionalcontext of opposition movements and constituted the construction of a specificlegal and institutional terrain that was capable of containing popular demands bydefining the terms and fixing the boundaries of representation and socialstruggle.76 It thus epitomised the structures of passive revolution: an attempt tointroduce aspects of change through the state as arbiter of social conflict. In thewords of Echeverría the political reform strove to ‘incorporate the majority of thecitizens and social forces into the institutional political process’.77 As KevinMiddlebrook has argued, this was a limited political opening that was essential ata time of severe social and political tension in order to balance stringenteconomic austerity measures with policies designed to diffuse widespreaddiscontent.78 The capacity of labour to articulate an alternative vision for Mexicaneconomic and social development through either official or independent unions,evident in the 1970s, thus declined throughout the 1980s to become scarcelyevident a decade later.79

What was evolving in the social formation at this time in Mexico, therefore,within the context of structural change in the global political economy, wasa shift in the hegemonic influence of the PRI. More accurately the attempt atpolitical reform in the 1970s was an indication of the ailing hegemony of the PRI.No longer capable of representing class-transcending interests, the PRI began toreorient the social relations of production towards a new hierarchy in favourof particular class forces. As a result it is possible to perceive the fraying andunravelling of PRI hegemony in the 1970s. The LOPPE political reform was a clearindication of an attempt to balance the competing demands of subaltern classeswith those of the private sector and transnational capital in Mexico. It was aresponse to the erosion of support for the basic structure of the political system.

Yet it is not easily explained as the exercise of ‘normal’ hegemony as outlinedearlier. Hegemony in this sense relies on the organic equilibrium of a relationshipbetween leaders and led, rulers and ruled, based on consent. Instead, the PRI

became increasingly unable to conceal its real predominance and relied on morecoercive measures. This was a situation when the party turned, ‘into a narrow

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clique which tends to perpetuate its selfish privileges by controlling or evenstifling opposition forces’.80 It entails a shift in the threshold of power fromconsensual to coercive means indicative of state crisis and the disintegrativeelements of catastrophic equilibrium. As a counterpart to the neoliberalaccumulation strategy, the PRI began increasingly to reflect these traits of passiverevolution throughout the 1980s.

For example, during the Salinas sexenio attempts were made particularly toreconstruct history in order to naturalise radical neoliberal changes to thepolitical economy.81 As a result, neoliberalism came to represent a ‘hegemonicshift’ in the attempt to dismantle the nationalism of the Mexican Revolutionlinked to ISI and to displace its political symbolism as a focal point of nationalconsciousness.82 Yet the government’s ideological use of the legacy of theMexican Revolution was not merely a straightforward foil for neoliberalismbut, instead, was adapted to specific conditions in Mexico. This fundamentalreconstruction of the hegemony of the PRI and transformation of state–civilsociety relations within Mexico was particularly exhibited through projects likethe National Solidarity Programme (PRONASOL).

Following the continued crisis of representation facing the PRI and the tenuouselectoral majority Salinas received from the electorate in 1988, a significantattempt was made to try and maintain hegemony. A notable feature in this effortwas PRONASOL, a poverty alleviation programme combining government financialsupport and citizen involvement to design and implement community develop-ment and public works projects. As the PRI had moved away from being aninclusive party designed to cover all segments of society to an exclusive one inwhich only some sectors were represented, PRONASOL was emblematic of theattempt to shore up the loss of hegemonic acquiescence.83 It combined materialand institutional aspects focusing on social services, infrastructure provision,and poverty alleviation in order to rearrange state–civil society relations and thecoalitional support of the PRI.84 There were three main objectives of PRONASOL.First, it attempted to adapt the state’s traditional social role to new economicconstraints and to redefine the limits of its intervention in the context of a neo-liberal strategy of accumulation. Second, it attempted to diffuse potential socialdiscontent through selective subsidies, to accommodate social mobilisationthrough ‘co-participation’, and to undermine the strength of left-wing oppositionmovements. Third, it attempted to restructure local and regional PRI elites undercentralised control.85 Clearly PRONASOL was therefore a targeted attempt tobuttress both the accumulation strategy of neoliberalism and the hegemony of thePRI that was under threat from these very changes.

Emanating from the Salinas camarilla that had dominated the SPP, PRONASOL

was officially described as an attempt to modernise, pluralise and democratisestate–civil society relations in Mexico as part of the doctrine of ‘socialliberalism’: ‘a mode of governance that ostensibly seeks to avoid the worstexcesses of both unfettered, free market capitalism and heavy-handed stateinterventionism, by steering a careful middle course between these “failed”extremes’.86 Usurping the language and mobilising role of grassroots organ-isations, PRONASOL was itself portrayed as a ‘new grassroots movement’,empowering citizens through ‘an experience of direct democracy’, while also

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redefining members of traditional corporatist organisations as ‘consumers’ ofelectricity, improved infrastructure, and educational scholarships.87 This new styleof thinking among state officials, ‘was reinforced by ideas recommending theinvolvement of the poor and NGOs in anti-poverty projects promoted by manyinternational actors, including international financial institutions such as theWorld Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, the United Nations, andinternational donors and development specialists.’88 Between 1989 and 1993 theWorld Bank directly lent PRONASOL US$350 million to improve rural serviceprovision and to support regional development in four of Mexico’s pooreststates—Oaxaca, Guerrero, Hidalgo and Chiapas—while the Bank also supporteda health and nutrition pilot project.89

Despite the rhetoric, however, PRONASOL preserved and even reinforcedpresidential rule and complemented the established bureaucracy. As DeniseDresser states, ‘the politics of PRONASOL sheds light on why hegemonic partieslike the PRI can survive even when threatened by powerful alternative organisa-tions, and why the party has apparently been able to revive after a period of crisisand decline.’90 Essentially PRONASOL was crucial to maintaining the lagging effectof the PRI’s hegemony because it provided the political conditions for sustainingthe neoliberal accumulation strategy, notably through a modernisation ofpopulism and traditional clientelist and corporatist forms of co-optation. This wascarried out through a process of concertación, understood as the negotiation ofco-operative agreements between social movements and the state involvingdivision and demobilisation. The concertación strategies espoused by PRONASOL

represented a convergence of interests between those of the popular organisationsand the technocratic sectors within the PRI and the government.91 Thus, while theSalinas administration presented neoliberalism as a hegemonic project in Mexico,it used PRONASOL to create a sense of inclusion and a durable base of supportwithin civil society. This objective was also fulfilled within PRONASOL by denyingthe existence of class antagonisms while at the same time claiming to transcendclass differences.92

By the time PRONASOL became institutionalised within the Ministry of SocialDevelopment (SEDESOL) in 1996, it was clear that the programme had beensuccessful in sustaining the passive revolution of neoliberalism.93 It was intrinsicin changing the correlation of class forces in Mexico—to supervise the ‘counter-attack of capital’ through passive revolution—within which there was a trans-formation of the elite from arbiter of class conflict to ruling in its own interests.94

PRONASOL incorporated potentially threatening leaders, alternative programmesand ideas by nullifying substantive differences. Hence, despite the neoliberalaccumulation strategy making it increasingly difficult to conceal the realpredominance of its narrow basis of interest representation, the PRI still managedto exert some form of dwindling hegemony, albeit relying more on coercion thanon truly hegemonic leadership. The increasing prevalence of coercion throughoutthe late 1980s and 1990s, particularly reflected in negligence of human rightsviolations evident in the rise in the number and profile of political assassinationsand kidnappings, bears this out. As Wil Pansters puts it, ‘the combined resultof neoliberal economic adjustment, institutional malfunctioning and the de-composition of personalistic networks and loyalties [w]as … an increase in

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violence at all societal levels.’95 This conflagration of protest was best epitomisedby the resurgence of guerrilla insurrection in the 1990s, which included theactivity of the Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR) in the states of Guerrero,Oaxaca, Chiapas, Michoacán, Puebla and Tabasco, as well as that of the ZapatistaArmy of National Liberation (EZLN) in Chiapas.96

Hence the view that there was a worsening crisis of hegemony throughout thephase of neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s and 1990s in Mexico. It was asituation when, ‘the ruling class has lost its consensus, ie is no longer “leading”but only dominant, exercising coercive force alone’, meaning, ‘precisely that thegreat masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and nolonger believe what they used to believe previously’.97 As the prominentintellectual Carlos Fuentes expressed it at the time: ‘It is as though the PRI hasgone out to kill itself, to commit suicide. There are Priístas killing Priístas …What we see is the internal decomposition of a party, which has, in effect,completed its historic purpose.’98 The PRI, to summarise, became a party thatincreasingly existed as ‘a simple, unthinking executor … a policing organism,and its name of “political party” [became] simply a metaphor of a mythologicalcharacter’.99 Social order was increasingly regressive, to the extent that the partywas ‘a fetter on the vital forces of history’ so that it had, ‘no unity but astagnant swamp … and no federation but a “sack of potatoes”, ie a mechanicaljuxtaposition of single units without any connection between them’.100

As a result, the changes inaugurated in Mexico that led to the promotion ofneoliberalism can be understood as an expression of passive revolution. Neo-liberalism continued to reflect the incomplete process of state and class formationin Mexico that was never truly settled after the Mexican Revolution. Itrepresented a furtherance of particular ‘path-dependent’ responses to forms ofcrisis and thus a strategy developed by the ruling classes to signify therestructuring of capitalism, or the ‘counter-attack of capital’, in order to ensurethe expansion of capital and the introduction of ‘more or less far-reachingmodifications … into the economic structure of the country.’101 Neoliberalism,therefore, can be summarised as less ‘tightly linked to a vast local economicdevelopment, but … instead the reflection of international developments whichtransmit their ideological currents to the periphery’.102 In Mexico, hegemonybecame limited to privileged groups and was based on a central core of elite andexclusionary decision making that enacted rhetorically ‘revolutionary’ changes inthe social relations of production, through the neoliberal accumulation strategy,alongside engineered social and political reform. As Jorge Castañeda hasdescribed it, neoliberalism as a hegemonic project only achieved a relative degreeof consensual acceptance within elite circles, while any mass support was usuallybased on misperceived or false pretences.103 It is more reasonable thereforeto argue that, beyond a convergence of interests between technocratic financeministers and global institutions, neoliberalism was imposed in Mexico. ‘Neo-liberalism was put in place by fiat and it has stayed in place by fiat just the waymost politics in Mexico has proceeded. There was no consensus it was justdone.’104 Needless to say, as the contradictions of neoliberalism become moreapparent, the ‘path-dependent legacies of neoliberal errors’ will also need to beaddressed.105

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However, it should not be presumed on the basis of the above argument thatboth the accumulation strategy and the hegemonic project of neoliberalismentailed the erosion of state power. Neoliberalism in Mexico did not involve thedismantling, or retreat, of the state, but the rearrangement of social relations intoa new hierarchy. As Dresser has commented:

Even though neoliberal policy currents underscore the importance of reducing theeconomic power of the state, the Mexican case reveals that the imperatives ofpolitical survival will often dictate the need for continued state intervention throughdiscretionary compensation policies.106

The modernisation, rather than dismantling, of the state through projects such asPRONASOL was thus based on a ‘neo-corporatist’ arrangement that was pivotal inbolstering the accumulation strategy and hegemonic project of neoliberalism.107

Updating the terrain of struggle

It remains to be seen, however, whether the victory of Vicente Fox will amount toradical changes to the accumulation strategy of neoliberalism. As the presidentialcandidate for the National Action Party (PAN)-supported Alianza por el Cambio,Fox won 42.5% of the votes cast, compared with Francisco Labastida, repre-senting the PRI, who received 36% and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, representing theAlianza por México—consisting of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)and smaller parties—who received 16.6%. The PRI also lost its position as thebiggest party in the lower house of congress, with 211 seats compared with the223 seats held by the Alianza por el Cambio and the 66 seats held by the PRD andits allies.108 However, as one former PRI veteran admitted after the elections, ‘WeMexicans want a president who makes decisions that go beyond a politicalparty’s own interests’.109 In this sense, Fox has been trying to build strong multi-party support in an endeavour to establish a ‘government of national unity’ bymaking overtures to centre-left intellectuals, the interests of large-scale monopolycapital and prominent Priístas. Referring to the latter, a report in Business Weekdeclared that appointments in these areas ‘would guarantee a measure ofcontinuity in economic policy in Mexico, something that investors would surelywelcome’.110 It is in this regard that the so-called Alternativa Latinoamericana(Latin American Alternative) to the neoliberal Washington Consensus should beconsidered.

Co-founded by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, a Brazilian political scientist, andJorge Castañeda, described by The Economist as a ‘self-anointed guru of LatinAmerica’s “new left”’,111 the basis of this alternative is supposedly ‘a call forradical change in the institutions of the market economy and the state’.112 Theoriginal document drafted by the policy group behind Alternativa Latino-americana—including figures such as Luiz Inácio da Silva (aka ‘Lula’) andRicardo Lagos, as well as Vicente Fox—outlines an indistinct mix of proposalsincluding the multilateral regulation of speculative capital; the stimulationof regional integration; and the revitalisation of taxation schemes, based onreconciling an increase in the level of indirect taxation of consumption, throughvalue-added tax, with the imperative of promoting private savings and invest-

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ment. The aim is ‘democratising development’ based on the reorganisation andrefinancing of the state, the stimulation of small and medium-sized enterprises,and the deepening of citizen participation and social rights.113

Yet the Alternativa appears to be a modernisation of neoliberalism, in order toreconstitute social cohesion, involving a mix of renewed taxation, monetary andsocial compensation policies, rather than the promotion of a truly alternativeparadigm.114 With a focus on market failure it remains, like much of the ‘post-Washington Consensus’, located within neoclassical economic debate about thesphere of exchange rather than production relations. As Castañeda has admitted,‘it is only an alternative within the existing framework of globalisation ratherthan purporting to break with it, because you can’t’.115 Significantly, it seemedlikely at one stage that recommendations within the Alternativa Latinoamericanamight be developed as part of a rethinking of neoliberal precepts within amodernisation of capitalism in Mexico.116 Yet, with an inability to secure supportfor legislation in congress, what seems more likely in Mexico is less theemergence of a new form of hegemony, based on organising concepts developedaround the Alternativa Latinoamericana. Instead, one might anticipate moremolecular social changes as part of the ongoing passive revolution, wherebyprevailing structures of political power are modified within conditions ofrecurring crisis. After all, the paramount issue, as Eduardo Bours Castelo(President of the CCE) stated, is to ‘assure society that we are not going to fallagain into recurrent crises’.117 The likelihood, then, is piecemeal reform ratherthan radical transformation: continuity rather than change.

This is most recently reflected in the proposed Plan Puebla–Panama (PPP)initiative to build a Trans-Isthmus development project along the Pacific and Gulfcoasts linking southern Mexico to North and Central America. Announced asFox’s ‘revolutionary plan’, it is precisely the continuity embedded within suchdevelopment proposals that provides a platform for the coalescence of ‘anti-passive revolution’ strategies of resistance.118 As the EZLN recently stated to Fox,‘although there is a radical difference in the way you came to power, yourpolitical, social and economic programme is the same we have been sufferingunder during the last administrations’.119 Similarly, wider resistance is reflected inrecent struggles such as that led by the people of San Salvador Atenco, who haveembarked on direct action strategies of popular mobilisation to rebut the Foxadministration’s plan to build an international airport on their land. The proposalto construct a new six-runway, US$2.3 billion airport at Texcoco on the easternoutskirts of Mexico City were opposed by the Atenco movement, which drew onsymbols of peasant identity, notably through machete-wielding protests.120 Theyattracted the support of radical groups, both national and international, to quashthe expropriation of 4000 hectares (10 000 acres) of land and halt theairport project, further highlighting the contradictions of neoliberal policies.121

Resistance is also mounting against second-generation neoliberal reforms in thecase of the battle over energy privatisation led by the Mexican Electricians’Union (SME). The proposals for privatising the electrical system have metopposition in the Mexican Congress but at stake is whether an alliance betweenthe SME, the umbrella National Union of Workers (UNT) federation, and fractionswithin another electrical workers’ union—the General Union of Mexican

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Electrical Workers (SUTERM)—can be successfully forged in order to raisebroader questions about the direction of economic development.122

Conclusion: the shifting sands of hegemony

The central contention of this article is that the process of historically specificinterest representation and class struggle in Mexico, reflected in the transitionfrom ISI to neoliberal capitalist accumulation, began in the 1970s as a result ofstructural changes in the nature of capitalism that contain within themselvescontradictions. By focusing on these features it was possible to emphasise howthe agenda of neoliberalism was constituted, or authored, by particular socialforces in Mexico.

It was argued that the accumulation strategy of neoliberalism, especiallyreflected in the era of salinismo, seriously eroded the historical basis of PRI

hegemony in Mexico. The demise of ISI and the rise of neoliberalism wereaccompanied by the exhaustion of PRI hegemony.123 Since the phase of structuralchange in the 1970s, the historical and social basis of PRI hegemony began toalter and seriously erode. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the PRI increasinglyresorted to forms of dominance and coercion to project an increasingly dwindlingform of hegemony. It is within this era of structural change that a crisis ofhegemony unfolded.

In every country the process is different, although the content is the same. And thecontent is the crisis of the ruling class’s hegemony … [Hence] a ‘crisis of authority’is spoken of: this is precisely the crisis of hegemony, or general crisis of the state.124

By thus tracing these shifting sands of hegemony it was argued that the PRI wasonly hegemonic in a very narrow sense and it continued to lose a large degree ofinternal coherence and legitimacy from the 1970s onwards. While the laggingeffects of such hegemony were evident during the restructuring of state–civilsociety relations within the accumulation strategy of neoliberalism, the historicpurpose of the PRI was ended by the victory of Vicente Fox on 2 July 2000. Itis beyond the scope of this article to determine whether a cohesive form ofhegemony will be refashioned under the PAN or whether the PRI will be able torevive its historic role. Yet it was possible in this account to emphasise variationsor lags in hegemony and how forms of hegemony were discernible but recessiveover the period under consideration since the 1970s. This helps to avoid eitherassuming that hegemony is switched on and off like a light bulb or indulging incrude dichotomies between coercion and consent in understanding the role andinfluence of the PRI within the conditions of passive revolution and recurringcrisis.

More generally the above analysis of neoliberalism in Mexico also highlightedhow social forces engendered common perspectives on the importance of fiscaldiscipline and market-orientated reforms between technocratic elites of acommon social background. Put differently, attention was drawn to an unfoldingprocess of class struggle brought about by the expansion of capital and theinternalisation of class interests between various fractions of classes withinstate–civil society relations.125 This involved focusing on how social relations

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within the form of state in Mexico were actively and passively implicated intransnational structures of the global political economy. The discussion of thePSE and PRONASOL, two coexisting measures both introduced to offset politicalinstability resulting from the neoliberal accumulation strategy and the re-configured hegemonic project of the PRI, exemplify this process of struggle.

A further point that the argument has raised is that the case of Mexico does notsignify the straightforward reproduction of a uniform ‘model’ of neoliberalism.Instead, the dissemination and acceptance of neoliberal values in Mexico hasmeant an adaptation of social relations to culturally specific conditions. To besure, this may result in resemblances with similar processes elsewhere inthe global political economy but, as the development of policies in Mexicodemonstrates, there is a certain peculiarity to local tendencies in response tostructural change in world order.

The final point that needs to be reaffirmed is that hegemony is alwaysconstantly under construction and contestation. The attempt to reconstitutehegemonic accord through the neoliberal restructuring of social relations inMexico should not be imputed as an historically inevitable act but the outcome ofsocial struggle and protest. Hence the importance of further considering ‘anti-passive revolution’ strategies of resistance to the impending second generation ofneoliberal capitalist development in Mexico and the future of those socialmovements that are probing the social and political foundations of the state.

NotesThe financial support of an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (Ref:T026271041) is gratefully acknowledged. I would also like to thank Andreas Bieler, Steve Hobden andStuart Shields for comments on this article in draft and the advice and encouragement of Ngai-Ling Sum.

1 The rationale for the conference was reaffirmed within an environment constituted by anoverwhelming number of (male) elites on the delegate and speakers lists and in the exclusivesurroundings of the Bloomberg Suite in Finsbury Square, London. Matching the exclusionaryconference fee, officially set at US$435, was the main social event consisting of a cocktail receptionat the Embassy of the Argentine Republic. I attended the conference courtesy of a complementaryticket.

2 Carlos Fuentes, ‘Mexico’s democratic transition’, BBC World Lecture, The Royal Society for theencouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, London, 16 June 1998. I would like to thankZina Rohan for a recording of this lecture.

3 Personal interview, Carlos Fuentes, London, 28 August 1998. For a more detailed examination of thisintellectual’s role in Mexico, see Adam David Morton, ‘The social function of Carlos Fuentes: acritical intellectual or in the “shadow of the state”?’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 22 (1),2003, pp 27–51.

4 See, inter alia, Robin Broad & John Cavanagh, ‘The death of the Washington consensus?’, WorldPolicy Journal, 16 (3), 1999, pp 79–88; Moises Naím, ‘Fads and fashions in economic reforms:Washington consensus or Washington confusion?’, Third World Quarterly, 21 (3), 2000, pp 505–528;and Ben Fine, Costas Lapavitsas & Jonathan Pincus (eds), Development Policy in the Twenty-FirstCentury: Beyond the Post-Washington Consensus, London: Routledge, 2001.

5 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed and trans Quintin Hoare and GeoffreyNowell-Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, pp 106–107.

6 Hugues Portelli, Gramsci y el bloque histórico, Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1973, p 30. I am grateful to BobJessop for bringing this aperçu to my attention.

7 On bureaucratic authoritarianism, see David Collier (ed), The New Authoritarianism in Latin America,Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979; Guillermo O’Donnell, Modernisation andBureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics, Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia, Institute of International Studies, 1973; James M Malloy (ed), Authoritarianism and

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Corporatism in Latin America, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977; José Luis Reyna& Richard S Weinhart (eds), Authoritarianism in Mexico, Philadelphia, PA: Institute for the Study ofHuman Issues, 1977; and Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘Reflections on the patterns of change in thebureaucratic-authoritarian state’, Latin American Research Review, 13 (1), 1978, pp 3-38. Theconflation of hegemony and coercion is still a tendency prevalent in more recent studies that becloudsthe contribution this notion can make to the study of the Mexican state. See, for example, Ruth BerinsCollier, The Contradictory Alliance: State–Labour Relations and Regime Change in Mexico,Berkeley, CA: University of Berkeley Press, 1992; Wayne A Cornelius, Mexican Politics inTransition: The Breakdown of a One-Party Dominant Regime, San Diego, CA: Centre forUS–Mexican studies, 1996; and Denise Dresser, ‘Mexico: the decline of dominant-party rule’, inJorge I Domínguez & Abraham F Lowenthal (eds), Constructing Democratic Governance: Mexico,Central America and the Caribbean in the 1990s, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,1996.

8 Leo Panitch, ‘Globalisation and the state’, in Leo Panitch & Ralph Miliband (eds), The SocialistRegister: Between Globalism and Nationalism, London: Merlin Press, 1994.

9 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, ‘State, transition and passive revolution’, in Chantal Mouffe (ed),Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London: Routledge, 1979, pp 223, 232.

10 For an outline, see Adam David Morton, ‘The sociology of theorising and neo-Gramscianperspectives: the problems of “school” formation in IPE’, in Andreas Bieler & Adam David Morton(eds), Social Forces in the Making of the New Europe: The Restructuring of European SocialRelations in the Global Political Economy, London: Palgrave, 2001.

11 Robert W Cox, ‘Gramsci, hegemony and international relations: an essay in method’, Millennium:Journal of International Studies, 12 (2), 1983, pp 162–175; Cox, Production, Power and WorldOrder: Social Forces in the Making of History, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp 218,230–244; and Kees van der Pijl, Transnational Classes and International Relations, London:Routledge, 1998, pp 105–106.

12 Partial exceptions here might include Enrico Augelli & Craig N Murphy, America’s Quest forHegemony and the Third World: A Gramscian Analysis, London: Pinter, 1988; Kees van der Pijl,‘Soviet socialism and passive revolution’, in Stephen Gill (ed), Gramsci, Historical Materialism andInternational Relations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Matt Davies, InternationalPolitical and Mass Communication in Chile: National Intellectuals and Transnational Hegemony,London: Macmillan, 1999; and Anne Showstack Sassoon, ‘Globalisation, hegemony and passiverevolution’, New Political Economy, 6 (1), 2001, pp 5–17.

13 Nicos Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, trans David Fernbach, London: New LeftBooks, 1975, pp 73–76.

14 Randall Germain & Michael Kenny, ‘Engaging Gramsci: international relations theory and the newGramscians’, Review of International Studies, 24 (1), 1998, pp 3–21. For an immanent critique of thisargument, see Adam David Morton, ‘Historicising Gramsci: situating ideas in and beyond theircontext’, Review of International Political Economy, 10 (1), 2003, pp 119–147.

15 Antonio Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings, ed Richard Bellamy, trans Virginia Cox, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 230–233 and Gramsci, Further Selections from the PrisonNotebooks, ed and trans Derek Boothman, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995, pp 330, 348–350.

16 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 119.17 Gramsci, Pre-Prison Writings, pp 20–21.18 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 132.19 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975, pp 73, 166.20 It is worth noting that the concept of passive revolution was developed as an explicit elaboration of

Marx’s ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. See Karl Marx, AContribution to the Critique of Political Economy, in Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, CollectedWorks, Vol 29, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1987, pp 261–265.

21 Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci’s Politics, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987,p 210.

22 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol I, ed Joseph A Buttigieg, trans Joseph A Buttigieg andAntonio Callari, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, p 137.

23 Anne Showstack Sassoon, Gramsci and Contemporary Politics: Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect,London: Routledge, 2000, p 72.

24 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp 105–106.25 Ibid, p 90.26 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp. 105–106; and Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol I,

pp 214–215.27 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 90; and Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol I, p 151.28 Bob Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002, pp 40–42, 58.

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29 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 396, emphasis added.30 Ibid, pp 110, 188.31 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith,

trans William Boelhower, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985, p 384.32 Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol I, pp 155–156.33 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp 219–223.34 Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp 220–221.35 Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, Vol II, ed and trans Joseph A Buttigieg, New York: Columbia

University Press, 1996, p 232.36 Bob Jessop, State Theory: Putting the Capitalist State in its Place, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990,

pp 198–199, 207–208.37 Miguel Ángel Centeno, Democracy Within Reason: Technocratic Revolution in Mexico,

Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, p 41.38 Enrique Dussel Peters, Polarizing Mexico: The Impact of Liberalisation Strategy, Boulder, CO:

Lynne Rienner, 2000, p 45.39 Personal Interview, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico City, 15 March 1999.40 Diane E Davis, ‘The dialectic of autonomy: state, class and economic crisis in Mexico, 1958–1982’,

Latin American Perspectives, 20 (3), 1993, p 55.41 Centeno, Democracy Within Reason, p 69.42 James D Cockcroft, Mexico: Class Formation, Capital Accumulation and the State, New York:

Monthly Review Press, 1983, p 259.43 Laurence Whitehead, ‘Mexico from bust to boom: a political evaluation of the 1976–1979 stabilisa-

tion program’, World Development, 8 (11), 1980, pp 846–847, 851.44 Cockcroft, Mexico: Class Formation, p 261.45 Davis, ‘The dialectic of autonomy’, p 61.46 Wayne A Cornelius, ‘The political economy of Mexico under de la Madrid: austerity, routinised crisis

and nascent recovery’, Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, 1 (1), 1985, pp 87–88.47 Personal interview, Will Ollard, Editor Mexico & NAFTA Report, London, 9 July 1998.48 Miguel Ángel Centeno & Sylvia Maxfield, ‘The marriage of finance and order: changes in the

Mexican political elite’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 24 (1), 1992, p 74.49 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 16.50 Berins Collier, The Contradictory Alliance, p 66.51 Centeno, Democracy Within Reason, p 152, n 25.52 Personal interview, Will Ollard, London, 9 July 1998.53 Personal interview, Alejandro Nadal, Mexico City, 8 and 15 March 1999.54 Cockcroft, Mexico: Class Formation, p 217.55 Leslie Sklair, Assembling for Development: The Maquila Industry in Mexico and the United States,

San Diego, CA: Centre for US–Mexican Studies, 1993, pp 13–14.56 Ibid, p 70.57 Ibid, p 227.58 John Gledhill, ‘The state, the countryside…and capitalism’, in Rob Aitken, Nikki Craske, Gareth A

Jones & David E Stansfield (eds), Dismantling the Mexican State?, London: Macmillan, 1996, p 183.59 Nikki Craske & Victor Bulmer-Thomas (eds), Mexico and the North American Free Trade

Agreement: Who Will Benefit?, London: Macmillan, 1994.60 Víctor L Urquidi, ‘The outlook for Mexican economic development in the 1990s’, in Maria Lorena

Cook, Kevin J Middlebrook & Juan Molinar Horcasitas (eds), The Politics of EconomicRestructuring: State–Society Relations and Regime Change in Mexico, San Diego, CA: Centre forUS–Mexican studies, 1994, p 58.

61 Blanca Heredia, ‘State–business relations in contemporary Mexico’, in Mónica Serrano & VictorBulmer-Thomas (eds), Rebuilding the State: Mexico After Salinas, London: Institute of LatinAmerican Studies, 1996, p 138.

62 Laurence Whitehead, ‘Political change and economic stabilisation: the “Economic Solidarity Pact”’,in Wayne A Cornelius, Judith Gentleman & Peter H Smith (eds), Mexico’s Alternative PoliticalFutures, San Diego, CA: Centre for US–Mexican Studies, 1989, p 210.

63 Matilde Luna, ‘Entrepreneurial interests and political action in Mexico: facing the demands ofeconomic modernisation’, in Riordan Roett (ed), The Challenge of Institutional Reform in Mexico,Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995, p 83.

64 Francisco Valdés Ugalde, ‘From bank nationalisation to state reform: business and the new Mexicanorder’, in Cook, Middlebrook & Horcasitas, The Politics of Economic Restructuring, p 230.

65 Francisco Valdés Ugalde, ‘The private sector and political regime change in Mexico’, in GerardoOtero (ed), Neoliberalism Revisited: Economic Restructuring and Mexico’s Political Future, Boulder,CO: Westview Press, 1996, p 42.

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66 Judith A Teichman, ‘Mexico: economic reform and political change’, Latin American ResearchReview, 31 (2), 1996, p 257.

67 Judith Clifton, The Politics of Telecommunications in Mexico: Privatisation and State–LabourRelations, 1982–1995, London: Macmillan, 2000.

68 Centeno, Democracy Within Reason, p 195.69 Maria Lorena Cook, Kevin J Middlebrook & Juan Molinar Horcasitas, ‘The politics of economic

restructuring in Mexico: actors, sequencing, and coalition change’, in Cook, Middlebrook &Horcasitas, The Politics of Economic Restructuring, p 18.

70 Kevin J Middlebrook, ‘Political liberalisation in an authoritarian regime: the case of Mexico’, inGuillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter & Laurence Whitehead (eds), Transitions From Authori-tarian Rule: Latin America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

71 See Joe Foweraker, Popular Mobilisation in Mexico: The Teachers’ Movement, 1977–87, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993.

72 Barry Carr, ‘Labour and the political left in Mexico’, in Kevin J Middlebrook (ed), Unions, Workersand the State in Mexico, San Diego, CA: Centre for US–Mexican Studies, 1991), pp 136–139.

73 Ibid, p 137.74 See Barry Carr, Mexican Communism, 1968–1983: Eurocommunism in the Americas?, San Diego,

CA: Centre for US–Mexican Studies, 1985.75 James D Cockcroft, Mexico’s Hope: An Encounter with Politics and History, New York: Monthly

Review Press, 1998, p 265.76 Foweraker, Popular Mobilisation in Mexico, pp 11–12.77 Octavio Rodríguez Araujo, cited in Wil Pansters, ‘The transition under fire: rethinking contemporary

Mexican politics’, in Kees Koonings & Dirk Krujit (eds), Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil Warand Terror in Latin America, London: Zed Books, 1999, p 241, emphasis in the original.

78 Kevin J Middlebrook, The Paradox of Revolution: Labour, the State and Authoritarianism in Mexico,Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, pp 223–224.

79 Maria Lorena Cook, ‘Mexican state–labour relations and the political implications of free trade’, LatinAmerican Perspectives, 22 (1), 1995, pp 77–94.

80 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 189.81 Carlos Salinas de Gortari, México: The Policy and Politics of Modernisation, trans Peter Hearn and

Patricia Rosas, Barcelona: Plaza & Janés Editores, 2002.82 Kathy Powell, ‘Neoliberalism and nationalism’, in Aitken et al, Dismantling the Mexican State?, p 40.83 Centeno, Democracy Within Reason, p 224.84 Wayne A Cornelius, Ann L Craig & Jonathan Fox, ‘Mexico’s national solidarity program: an

overview’, in Wayne A Cornelius, Ann L Craig & Jonathan Fox (eds), Transforming State–SocietyRelations in Mexico: The National Solidarity Strategy, San Diego, CA: Centre for US–MexicanStudies, 1994, p 3.

85 Denise Dresser, Neopopulist Solutions to Neoliberal Problems: Mexico’s National SolidarityProgram, San Diego, CA: Centre for US–Mexican Studies, 1991, pp 1–2.

86 Carlos Salinas, ‘Second State of the Nation Report’ (1 November 1990), cited in Cornelius, Craig &Fox, ‘Mexico’s national solidarity program’, p 4.

87 Carlos Salinas, ‘Fifth State of the Nation Report’ (1 November 1993), cited in Cornelius, Craig &Fox, ‘Mexico’s national solidarity program’, pp 6–7.

88 Kerianne Piester, ‘Targeting the poor: the politics of social policy reforms in Mexico’, in Douglas AChalmers et al (eds), The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America: Rethinking Participation andRepresentation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 473.

89 Cornelius, Craig & Fox, ‘Mexico’s national solidarity program’, p 16.90 Dresser, Neopopulist Solutions to Neoliberal Problems, p 2.91 Ibid, p 32.92 Denise Dresser, ‘Bringing the poor back in: national solidarity as a strategy of regime legitimation’, in

Cornelius, Craig & Fox, Transforming State–Society Relations in Mexico, p 147.93 Susanne Soederberg, ‘From neoliberalism to social liberalism: situating the national solidarity

program within Mexico’s passive revolutions’, Latin American Perspectives, 28 (3), 2001,pp 102–123.

94 Donald Hodges & Ross Gandy, Mexico Under Siege: Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism,London: Zed Books, 2002, p 246.

95 Pansters, ‘The transition under fire’, p 256, emphasis in the original.96 Adam David Morton, ‘“La Resurrección del Maíz”: globalisation, resistance and the Zapatistas’,

Millennium, 31 (1), 2002, pp 27–54. 97 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, pp 275–276.98 Carlos Fuentes, cited in ‘Political reform must be President Ernesto Zedillo’s priority’, Mexico &

NAFTA Report, 8 December 1994 (RM-94-12).

652


99 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 155.100 Ibid, pp 155, 190.101 Gramsci, Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 350.102 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 116.103 Personal interview, Jorge Castañeda, Mexico City, 9 and 13 March 1999.104 Personal interview, Lucy Conger, Mexico City, 4 March 1999.105 Jessop, The Future of the Capitalist State, p 169.106 Dresser, ‘Bringing the poor back in’, p 155.107 Nikki Craske, Corporatism Revisited: Salinas and the Reform of the Popular Sector, London:

Institute of Latin American Studies, 1994.108 ‘Fox wins, stunning pollsters and delighting supporters and markets’, Mexico & NAFTA Report, 11 July

2000 (RM-00-07).109 Alfonso Durazo, cited in ‘The PRI may tear itself apart’, Business Week, 17 July 2000.110 ‘Mexican revolution’, Business Week, 17 July 2000.111 ‘A new breed for Fox’, The Economist, 22 July 2000.112 ‘New ideas for the old left’, The Economist, 17 January 1998.113 Roberto Mangabeira Unger & Jorge G Castañeda, ‘A Latin American alternative’, Buenos Aires,

November 1997, at http://www.roberto.com/alternative.htm, accessed 17 January 1998. See also JorgeCastañeda, ‘Mexico: permuting power’, New Left Review II, 7, 2001, pp 17–41.

114 Lucy Conger, ‘A fourth way? The Latin American alternative to neoliberalism’, Current History, 97(22), 1998, pp 380–384.

115 Personal interview, Jorge Castañeda, Mexico City, 9 and 13 March 1999.116 ‘The Mangabeira key to Fox’s plans’, Mexico & NAFTA Report, 11 July 2000 (RM-00-07).117 As cited Cockcroft, Mexico’s Hope, p 375.118 ‘Fox addresses regional development’, Financial Times, 26 March 2001; and Braulio Moro, ‘Central

America’s jaguars snarl’, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2002, English edition, p 10.119 Communiqué from Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, ‘Letter to Vicente Fox’, 2 December 2000, at

http://www.ezln.org, accessed 30 January 2001.120 ‘Farmers keep their land from becoming new Mexico City airport’, Guardian, 3 August 2002.121 James W Russell, ‘Land and identity in Mexico: peasants stop an airport’, Monthly Review, 54 (9),

2003, pp 14–25. See also Enrique Rajchenberg S., ‘San Salvador Atenco: La Tierra nose Vende,Entrevista con David Pájaro’, Bajo el Volcán, 2 (5), 2002, pp 171–181.

122 David Bacon, ‘Mexico: lights out for electric company sale?’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 36 (3),2003, pp 29–33.

123 Personal interview, Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Mexico City, 15 March 1999.124 Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p 210.125 Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism, pp 73–76.

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Documents

Morton on Mexico